Executive Council Faculty

Philosophy of language, semantics, pragmatics, and the syntax-semantics interface. I have focused on such topics as the nature of linguistic meaning, the ways meaning and context of utterance interact, and mechanisms of semantic composition and how they relate to syntax.

The nature of cognitive architecture, including the connectionism/classicism debate; psychosemantics and the theory of meaning for mental representations.

Perceptual content and mental content more generally, attention, perceptual evidence, the relationship between the phenomenological and epistemological role of perceptual experience, the situation-dependency of perceptual experience, imagination, mental capacities. 

Neurobiology of learning and memory. Applies epigenetic, molecular, and electrophysiological techniques in animals to understand the basis of associative learning and memory determined by behavior; combines sensory neurophysiology (in the auditory system) with behavioral neuroscience to study how memory and perception intertwine.

The influence of prior knowledge on memory and decision making in naturalistic environments.

Conceptual development and the representation of the physical world, of Agency, and of "theory of mind" in infants and preschoolers; also their impairment in autism

Study of visual search and saccadic eye movements, short-term visual memory, perceptual learning and cue integration. Formal computational and ideal observer modeling of visual tasks and of population coding in visual cortex

Understanding how individual neurons in the brain contribute to this process has been a major challenge, and experiments are often intentionally designed to break this natural action-sensation loop, leaving us with incomplete models of how the brain actually works to drive behavior under real-world conditions.

Language acquisition and learnability theory; the cognitive and neural bases of language, language acquisition, and language processing; studies of sentence processing using neuroimaging.

Neuroethology. Using behavioral, neurophysiological, and anatomical methods in songbirds to study sensory and motor processes that subserve vocal learning, including auditory memory, perception, and production of learned vocalizations.

Dr. Zhang's research combines computational modeling, behavioral methods and neural imaging to understand human memory. She is interested in how the human memory system uses its limited cognitive resources to efficiently retrieve past experiences and knowledge, and how we as researchers can design methods to improve human memory performance.